Vanguard - The Anti-Review

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"We will have a lot of work to do post-launch and the first couple of months post-launch will be just as busy as beta 5 with lots of patches, bug fixes, new feathres[sic], etc." – Brad McQuaid on beta concerns for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes performance

Honestly, you've got to respect the man's candor. Many criticisms may be laid at the feet of former Everquest Vision™ junkee and current Sigil Games Vision™ proselytizer Brad McQuaid but indirectness is not one of them. To be fair, I've poached a single sentence from one of a million forum posts by the guy, taken it out of context and placed it in italics to give it a weight beyond the scope of the original statement, so let's not pretend that this is some kind of mission statement on releasing the game. The thing is, having played Vanguard: Saga of Heroes whenever I could muster the fortitude over the past two weeks, Brad's post is a pretty salient commentary on the state of the game's release.

When in early February, a Vanguard review key wandered into my grasp I, as something of a Massively Multiplayer gaming addict, set out immediately with the intent of investing dozens of hours into its three-tiered gameplay structure to construct a fair and well-informed review of the title. I even joined with a colleague in what we termed a "blood oath" to achieve at the very least level 20 so that we had a clear impression of both the solo and grouping content of the game. What happened instead is that I kept finding excuses not to play a game that was mediocre at its best and flatly annoying most of the rest of the time.

My goal was to inform myself to a complete enough degree to write a review. This is not that review. That review will never exist, because I am simply not willing to force myself to play long enough to construct a fully realized impression of Norrath. No, wait. Norrath was Everquest. What's this place called again? Let me look it up, and I'll get back to you "…

"… Telon! Right, that's the place I've been avoiding.

Now, I'm going to stop fans of Vanguard right here, because I don't care about your vehement and impassioned emails. I honestly don't. First of all, as I mentioned this isn't a review, and I'm not pawning this off as a complete examination of the entire game, but more importantly I'm under no obligation to like Vanguard, and I'm not going to trot out the tired old conventions of picking out small and often insignificant things that don't suck to balance out against the overwhelming majority of things that do suck.

So, what's wrong with Vanguard? How long you got?

The engine seems tailor made for a Sony Online game – despite Sigil's years of work with Microsoft only to be unceremoniously, and maybe not mysteriously, dumped in 2006 – in that it:

1) Makes everything appear to be made of shiny plastic and,

2) Doesn't work

The landscapes feel lifeless, designed either as great open spaces where oddly shaped creatures wait to be slaughtered and harvested at the whim of the local constabulary, or equally often as tightly confined valleys between vertical cliffs of ridiculous proportions that look exactly like what I'd make with Maya if I wanted to try my hand at cliff making. Also, between these cliffs of insanity, are the same oddly shaped creatures, the slaughtering, and lazy constables. The quests come verbatim from The Big Book of MMOG Quests, and every phase of character development feels awkward. On any given swing of a sword a character might gain familiar skill increases for usual offensive and defensive attributes, but along with those one might receive upgrades in tactic recognition, spell recognition, perception, detection, light fandango tripping and smoothie making. Every conflict fills my chat bar with information that I don't really understand, and ultimately don't care about.

Much of Vanguard seems intentionally obtuse and as counter-intuitive as possible while at the same time wrapping itself in tired trappings that have been done far better. Judging an enemy's relative difficulty is itself a multi-layered exploration in cryptography. For example, a level 5 – 2 dot creature is actually less difficult than a level 4 – 3 dot creature. Do you know what that means? Well neither did I for about nine levels, and let me tell you it makes more than a marginal difference! Would it surprise you to know that, where at level 1 you hit creatures for the traditional handful of hit points, by level 6 you might have a critical hit for several hundred damage? Would it further surprise you to find that those hundreds of points of damage against a newbie mob won't do much serious damage, you know unless it's a level 6 – 1 dot. Obviously I'm talking about a level 4 – 4 dot or level 5 – 3 dot, which are clearly far more difficult that some 6-1!

Death is a fact of life for the early adventurer, and not just the kind of death that comes from hyper-fast respawns and wandering creatures several levels higher than you, but the really annoying death that can only be achieved by not understanding what the holy hell is going on. Fortunately characters are not "eligible" for death penalty for the first few levels. I put eligible in quotes because I was always struck on my many young deaths by not being eligible to be penalized by a game. I wondered if there were people at level 5 running around anxiously anticipating that glorious day when they, like their fathers before them, would be "eligible" for in-game punishment.

But, of course, adventuring, such as it's called, is only one of the spheres of Vanguard's three-sphere gameplay model. There is also Crafting and Diplomacy in which, theoretically, one could invest themselves entirely without paying much attention to improving their Bleeding From Puncture Wounds skill. Of the two spheres, Diplomacy most intrigued me with its collectible card style play.

In Diplomacy parleys you and your mob opponent both start with a pool of points. The first person to get rid of all their points wins the conversation. There is a marker that is moved by playing cards, and at the end of each turn whichever side of the board the marker is on gets rid of one of their points. If you, as the player, remove a point from your own pool then the conversation progresses.

Here are the problems:

1) Despite having names like Forceful Demand, Complimentary Comment or Obfuscating And Slightly Suggestive Imperative, the cards themselves do nothing to altar the static flow of conversations. Even as you play Angry Non-Sequiter, your side of the conversation may end up being conciliatory and diplomatic.

2) Card Gameplay gets redundant. It's one thing to hit the millionth local bandit with a sword, but grinding a card game is a whole new level of hardcore that I'm just not prepared to explore.

3) Vanguard doesn't do a great job of drawing you into the stories. Names of places and people seem so equally unfamiliar as to be interchangeable, and proper nouns suffer from more apostrophes than an all-night marathon viewing of Conjunction Junction. I can only care for so long that the Jaa'bba'lly of F'za'nnnjj province want Kwagzatz of the Hoohanie dead, which is why they are hiring Zv'ii'tz of the K's'tt''ll clan to concoct a slow acting poison to be applied to Kwagzatz's F'oo'd', and it's your job to convince nine different people to give you the nine different components of the poison.

4) There's no real sense of advancement. Occasionally you get a new card, or some new piece of diplomatic clothing that grants you an extra green dot at the beginning of each parlay, but who cares?

Diplomacy is a clever idea that's not nearly engaging enough at lower levels to encourage the player to move forward. The Diplomacy game lacks the levels of nuance and strategy that make CCG games so addicting, and the actions of parley seems only barely related to what's transpiring in the game. It would be like giving your character all kinds of interesting combat skills, but every time you activate those skills you just swing your sword the same way.

But, so what? Right? Tired and redundant gameplay, barely interesting story, artificial environments populated with lame quests and an over population of sword fodder; I could be talking about any MMO on the market. The whole damn genre has run off the rails and become a parody of itself. Click the button and a gamer-treat rolls occasionally down the little pipe activating neurotransmitters in the brain that beg endlessly for more tiny little gamer-treats. So why pick on the little guy?

Fine, you want to know what really pisses me off about Vanguard; what voices me with the attitude that Sigil stole my lunch money? Vanguard sets a bad precedent for development and product release. In the months to launch Brad McQuaid made it very clear that regardless of whether Vanguard was actually ready for launch Sony, which had saved the game from cancellation following Microsoft's parting of ways, had set a firm timetable for retail, and come hell or high water the game only had enough money and time to reach that date. So, now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers.

Let me put it bluntly, if a game is not ready for retail when the money runs out find another investor or shut the doors. We are customers, and the retail end of the industry is bad enough about not supporting incomplete or inoperable products without developers and publishers assuming we are investors in the development process. Your job as the industry is to create product, and then, and only then, we buy it.

So, what to say in capping off my thoughts on Vanguard. First, to you Vanguard faithful who, even now, are anxious to point out all the little things that make Vanguard great on which I completely missed the boat possibly because I'm just some World of Warcraft lamer who can't handle a man's MMO, go suck a sock. I don't care about the stuff I missed because the larger picture, the game itself that's supposed to facilitate my giving a crap about the exploration was barely functional, obtuse and uninspiring. To the guys who made Vanguard and for whatever reason maybe put themselves through reading this, I'm sorry to kick your baby down the stairs, but too many game writers these days are so busy tap dancing around offending someone in the industry that they've lost sight of telling consumers not to buy mediocre games. And, finally, to the reader who is wondering if Vanguard is worth playing, had I to do it all over again I sure wouldn't, and my copy was free.

* Your System Has No Flaws
* It's Not Broken, It's Hard-Core
* Praising Another System Is the Same as Insulting Yours
* Everyone's Biased but You

What's interesting about this is why there is *so* much emotional attachment to these games and what people really invest in these games. Why does the fanboy need to preach their game to others in order to 'defend and promote' what basically sounds like an argument people on street corners passing out flyers make when they tell me of the wonders of their god?

I've always associated MMORPGs with music. People are very concerned about how their musical tastes (a la Office Space) will make them look to others, as if the type of music we listen to defines us -- so too does the MMORPG we decide to play?

I think this could be made into a viable thesis. I'll read and edit for anyone interested in taking it on.

Well, Cooking Mama didn't help me become a better cook, and Trauma Center certainly didn't help me become a better surgeon. I have the proof of both sitting in my freezer. -- imbiginjapan

Just a thought: Those gamers that derive self worth from their character specs probably need to claim that the environment of that character (the game/server/whatever) is valid. Probably doesn't apply to most, though.

Hypatian wrote:

Words... are a big deal.

Enix wrote:

The only way writers are going to get better is if they get some decent damned editing.

I've been a gamer for almost 11 years now at age 18. All I can say is that this is how I feel most of the time i try a new game these days after reading reviews that metaphorically 'suck the developers knob' if I may.

I'm glad someone can review a game with such humor, wit, and raw honesty. Great work, and from reading the responses in defence of the game I can say this is one I will stay away from for sure.

Should I just let this die?
For anyone still following, Vanguard/Sigil made massive layoffs a few days ago while Brad McQuaid and others have started making a few public comments about what's been happening. No one seems to be contending that the game was anywhere near ready at launch or even now. The most positive spin they can find is "it has potential".

At the least, a lot of people lost there jobs and a lot of people have been hurt. Hopefully the talented people will find new jobs soon. There some airing of dirty laundry but not too much. It looks like a textbook meltdown - the people in charge were not making good decisions or listening to people around them and everyone felt frustrated and stifled.

So I'm a couple of years late to finding this 'review' but I was there when the game was released so it's all fresh in my mind. I am amazed that this kind of thing would be written by someone. It's not a review or an anti-review at all. It's a ranting witch hunt which is extremely biased, extremely subjective, extremely negative, and also very incorrect too. It's too late now to make much of a difference, but I personally think that people like you with some kind of personal agenda, have screwed Vanguard for everyone else, and you have screwed yourselves out of a great game too. You call yourself an MMORPG player but you clearly aren't one if you would write something like that. Here's what I think about your comments. I should say first off though, that I have friends who really dislike this game and quit in the first month, but I appreciate their opinions because they could at least justify them and qualify them and they were based in reality, unlike yours.

Honestly, you've got to respect the man's candor. Many criticisms may be laid at the feet of former Everquest Vision™ junkee and current Sigil Games Vision™ proselytizer Brad McQuaid but indirectness is not one of them. To be fair, I've poached a single sentence from one of a million forum posts by the guy

Not only that comment, but you took the entire game out of context and twisted it, purely because you don't care about accuracy at all, nor fairness or reasonableness. In my opinion, the people who even mention that guy's name are instantly showing themselves up as being biased. They are either (a) Fanboys who worshipped him, and therefore had out of whack expectations of what the game would be, or they are (b) Trolls who know the guy's name and like to use him as a figure head to aim their nerd rage towards. The sad thing is, I think the average gamer who looked at this game would like it and would judge it fairly. They would judge it for what it is and not negatively because of their own preconceived ideas.

I set out immediately with the intent of investing dozens of hours into its three-tiered gameplay structure to construct a fair and well-informed review of the title.

So instead you decided to write something that was not fair, and not well informed. Nice idea...

Now, I'm going to stop fans of Vanguard right here, because I don't care about your vehement and impassioned emails. I honestly don't.

You don't care, because you know they are right. You unleashed your dorky trollish nerd rage about some game because you suffer from depression or something, and then you put your fingers in your ears and shout LALALALALALA I DONT WANNA HEAR! because you don't want people to tell you the truth.

graphics engine
1) Makes everything appear to be made of shiny plastic and,

2) Doesn't work

The landscapes feel lifeless, designed either as great open spaces

Ok first off, the majority of the game world is brimming with life. Compared to successful games like EQ it's a massive step forward, it's even comparable, perhaps even better than games like WoW. Unless you are talking about the Beta version of the game, your comment makes no sense. The only great open spaces are a few great open plains or deserts which are supposed to be great and open. I really have to question how long you were in the game, or whether you even played it at all... if you say that.
Secondly, *everything* doesn't look like plastic. I will grant you that the faces of the characters in the game aren't perfect and look a bit doll like. But the polished STEEL armour that they all wear... can you guess why that might be shiny? It's shiny by design you dumbass. As for the landscapes and game objects, they are not shiny unless they are meant to be. You only need to look at screenshots to see how great this game looks. If there is one thing you should give credit to this game for, it's coming up with the best looking MMORPG on the market. Even today, the only thing that is comparable is Age of Conan.

oddly shaped creatures wait to be slaughtered and harvested at the whim of the local constabulary

Are you new to MMORPG's or something? It's a FANTASY game, so of course the creatures are going to be oddly shaped. Perhaps you should go back to Counterstrike or something? And killed and then harvested... again, that's exactly what players WANT to do in these games.

vertical cliffs of ridiculous proportions that look exactly like what I'd make with Maya if I wanted to try my hand at cliff making.

Again, it's a f*cking fantasy game you dumb sh*t. There are also magic islands floating in the sky, are you going to criticise them too? The occasional weird mountain is no different to what you might see in certain parts of the American south, and is certainly not out of place in a fantasy MMORPG.

The quests come verbatim from The Big Book of MMOG Quests

Like every other MMORPG ever made you mean? You think WoW with it's 13+ million customers did the quests any better? If so, you are wrong. Welcome to the genre you claim to be an expert of...

every phase of character development feels awkward.

How the hell is it awkward? It's exactly the same as EverQuest only with more freedom and more customisation. It's great.

On any given swing of a sword a character might gain familiar skill increases for usual offensive and defensive attributes, but along with those one might receive upgrades in tactic recognition, spell recognition, perception, detection, light fandango tripping and smoothie making. Every conflict fills my chat bar with information that I don't really understand, and ultimately don't care about.

You don't understand it BECAUSE you don't care about it, and because you are a f*cking retarded dumb sh*t. If you are too dumb to actually read 'words', then all you need to do is look at the numbers floating over the mob's head. You don't actually have to read anything, because like you already said, the skills increase by simply fighting. You don't have to DO anything. There was an entire generation of gamers who figured this all out back in 1999 when EverQuest took off, and you are obviously far more retarded than all the hundreds of thousands of people who played and mastered that game. Vanguard is no different, it just has more.

Much of Vanguard seems intentionally obtuse and as counter-intuitive

Perhaps you couldn't figure it all out because you didn't give the game ANY care and attention, you didn't read things properly, and you basically sat there with your thumb up your ass WANTING to not like it like some kind of dumb miserable bastard. All you need to do is actually read things and you can figure it out. You can mouse over anything in the game and the tooltip tells you what it is. If you can't figure it out but everyone else can, then what does that say about you?

wrapping itself in tired trappings that have been done far better.

What has been done far better exactly? I can agree with you that it was very buggy at release, and it was also unstable, and there were performance problems. But besides the technical problems, the game itself is superb. I want to know, what do you think was done better? You may be a retard who is too dumb to figure out how to play it, and ran back to WoW with your tail between your legs, but if you spent any time in Vanguard and any time in other MMORPG's, you can see that it clearly does most things better than them all. The combat system for example, is the best I've ever seen. WoW is basically a carbon copy of EQ. Vanguard is a carbon copy of EQ, but with a bunch of great stuff added on top, like the Jin points, the Phenomena points, the reactionary moves, combos, and combat chains.
Then there is the crafting, anyone who spent a mere 5 minutes doing crafting KNOWS that it's better than any other MMORPG.

Judging an enemy's relative difficulty is itself a multi-layered exploration in cryptography. For example, a level 5 – 2 dot creature is actually less difficult than a level 4 – 3 dot creature. Do you know what that means? Well neither did I for about nine levels,

Ok it's really clear to me now, you are just extremely dumb. THAT's why you didn't like this game! Are you about 9 years old? Did your mother drink and smoke crack when she was pregnant with you? Did she drop you on your head? Did you skip a lot of school and go sniff glue instead? Is there a history in inbreeding in your family? Whatever it is, I pity you, but it's very clear now that you are simply plain old dumb.
A multi layered exploration in cryptography lol... That really did make me lol.
EVERY MOB in this entire game has a huge name above their head. If it's red, they are aggressive, if it's not red, they are not. It doesn't get any f*cking easier than that you dumb sh*t. The level is mob's level.... At this point it's exactly the same as old EverQuest and WoW, only EASIER because of the red name. You don't even need to consider stuff in this game. You can see their name, and if you target it, it tells you the exact level.
So the only other thing is the dots system, and it's so f*cking easy to understand, a child could understand it with just the simplest of explanations.
Seriously..... if you can't understand this, you have no place writing anything about games like this. Go back to f*cking Peggle or something because you are totally out of your depth in proper games.

and let me tell you it makes more than a marginal difference! Would it surprise you to know that, where at level 1 you hit creatures for the traditional handful of hit points, by level 6 you might have a critical hit for several hundred damage?

That's because it's a different system to other games. People criticise is if games don't do new things, and when they do, they criticise it for trying something different. The lesson? People that criticise random sh*t like that are f*cking retards.
The game has a different number system. Cash is 100's instead of 10's like EQ was. Damage is in bigger numbers instead of pitiful numbers like EQ was. So when you want high DPS, instead of the chat window being spammed by a billion hits from a fast monk or ranger class like what happened in EQ, instead, you get very large hits that do the damage. I have a powerful Druid who is level 32 and I can nuke for over a thousand. It's satisfying, and only an idiot would criticise that.

Would it further surprise you to find that those hundreds of points of damage against a newbie mob won't do much serious damage, you know unless it's a level 6 – 1 dot. Obviously I'm talking about a level 4 – 4 dot or level 5 – 3 dot, which are clearly far more difficult that some 6-1!

Again, you are f*cking retarded. 1,2,3 dot mobs are for soloing. 4 dot mobs are hard and what dungeons are filled with. 5 and 6 dot mobs are group and raid only. So if your dumb ass went chasing after a 4 or 5 dot mob, then of course you are going to struggle.
You seriously just seem so out of your depth in a game like this. What you are talking about is basically you walking up to a heavyweight boxer and kicking him in the nuts, and then you complain when he bitch slaps you across the room. The game gave you all the information you needed to determine this before you even got NEAR the mob. All you needed to do was target the mob and you would know this. The help explains what the dots mean.

Death is a fact of life for the early adventurer, and not just the kind of death that comes from hyper-fast respawns and wandering creatures several levels higher than you

Again, go back to f*cking WoW or Counterstrike if you are too dumb to handle yourself in a grown ups game. The mobs wander because the millions of NONE simple minded kiddies out there want a game that isn't just a f*cking shooting gallery. If you used your EYES and looked, you would see the mobs wandering, and their red names means they are aggro. If you targetted them, it would show their EXACT level. So really, if you walk in to mobs like that, then you deserve to die.

the really annoying death that can only be achieved by not understanding what the holy hell is going on.

Again, you don't understand what is going on because you are stupid, careless, and not interested in learning. Seriously you sound like a f*cking c*nt. Do you go on to a golf course and start waving the club around proclaiming that golf is sh*t because you can't hit the ball straight? New things take practice and people ENJOY LEARNING. They have brains, and they do stuff like that to occupy their brains. You sound like a typical f*cking 12 year old brat prick who wants everything handed on a plate and doesn't want to try or think about anything. What a f*cking scum bag sh*t for brains you are.

Fortunately characters are not "eligible" for death penalty for the first few levels. I put eligible in quotes because I was always struck on my many young deaths by not being eligible to be penalized by a game. I wondered if there were people at level 5 running around anxiously anticipating that glorious day when they, like their fathers before them, would be "eligible" for in-game punishment.

No by the time you ready for the death penalty the majority of people understand how to play the game, because unlike you, they have brains, and they have their brains switched on.

Here are the problems:

1) Despite having names like Forceful Demand, Complimentary Comment or Obfuscating And Slightly Suggestive Imperative, the cards themselves do nothing to altar the static flow of conversations. Even as you play Angry Non-Sequiter, your side of the conversation may end up being conciliatory and diplomatic.

Do you even realise what you are suggesting there? Can you imagine how many millions of lines of dialogue there would need to be in a game if it allowed you to change the course of conversations by using all these different cards? Ridiculous. The whole point of diplomacy is that you want to progress the conversation to see what they have to say and to get to the end of it successfully. The game is just about moving the steps forward, not about changing what they say.

2) Card Gameplay gets redundant. It's one thing to hit the millionth local bandit with a sword, but grinding a card game is a whole new level of hardcore that I'm just not prepared to explore.

Not prepared to explore because you are a lazy dumb sh*t scumbag. Which is obvious. The fact is, people have complained for years that they want ways to play in MMORPG's and socialise but they don't want to be forced to fight to make progress. THIS GAME GAVE THEM EVERYTHING THEY WANTED. You can now progress through the levels by crafting or with this diplomacy, and the diplomacy is fun and addictive when you get in to it. It's also extremely valuable to both the player who does, and all the other players in their area.

3) Vanguard doesn't do a great job of drawing you into the stories. Names of places and people seem so equally unfamiliar as to be interchangeable

It's unfamiliar because it's a new game. The names were all very familiar to me after just a month, but I suppose you wouldn't appreciate that because I doubt you played it more than a few days. Because you are a dumb, lazy, QUITTER. Your crack whore mother must be real proud of you.

4) There's no real sense of advancement. Occasionally you get a new card, or some new piece of diplomatic clothing that grants you an extra green dot at the beginning of each parlay, but who cares?

You obviously didn't get very far, which is predictable of you.

Fine, you want to know what really pisses me off about Vanguard; what voices me with the attitude that Sigil stole my lunch money? Vanguard sets a bad precedent for development and product release. In the months to launch Brad McQuaid made it very clear that regardless of whether Vanguard was actually ready for launch Sony, which had saved the game from cancellation following Microsoft's parting of ways, had set a firm timetable for retail, and come hell or high water the game only had enough money and time to reach that date. So, now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers.

Ahhh so here we finally reach the truth behind this whole bullsh*t story of yours. You are pissy because they were forced to release prematurely and it put you in negative mode and so you decided to rip the game to shreds. That makes you a complete prick.

I think it's a pretty honorable thing to criticise this reliance on paying customers to fund the final stages of MMORPG betas, but really, all games do it and you should at least give the games themselves credit if they are good. Both WoW and EverQuest were in a sh*tty condition at first too, but they survived because EQ had no competition, and because WoW had an endless stream of Blizzard kiddies descending up on it which allowed them to afford continued development of it after release. Vanguard could have gone the same way if enough people gave it a chance but it wasn't lucky unlike those other games. At least give it credit for being a good game under the surface. 2 years on, SoE have tidied it up and I just played through their trial from 1-10 in all spheres and then I went on to the full game. It's a great game and I enjoy it far more than any other MMORPG I've played. It's testament to great game that people like you didn't have the patience or intelligence to see.

I hope you are really proud of yourself, Mr Righteous Gameslayer. You helped kill the naughty game that had bugs in, and now instead we can all go and play... oh wait... there is f*ck all else to play! There is the much sh*ttier AOC, and the much sh*ttier WAR, and a bunch of other sh*tty messes. The only decent MMORPG out there is WoW, and as we've established, it's far too simple and shallow. So you were partly responsible for killing the one game that could developed in to something really great. It's still here after 2 years, and it now has an expansion and they increased the level cap and they have really tidied it up. Imagine where it could have been if it wasn't for the bullsh*t from people like you. The extra players could have turned this in to the epic experience that it could easily have been with more time and money.

The thing is though, I'm not even a fanboy. The TOTAL amount of time I've played Vanguard is about 1 month. I quit just a month after release and have only been back 2 more times each for just a few days. My reason for not playing it though is really specific and actually has some merit, and it's not a bunch of made up bullsh*t from some retard who probably needs help tying his shoe laces.

So really it's hell hath no fury like a general gamer who hates how any f*cking retard can create 'articles' for the whole world to see, even though they barely know anything about what they are talking about.

Nobody is going to accept this statement. You cannot manage to make your points about Vanguard and Elysium's review thereof without resorting to crude profanity and name calling. These things are the very hallmark of the rabid fanboy, and clearly show that to you this is personal.

The funniest part? I pasted this into my handy dandy word processor to get a word count, and found that that you spent EIGHT PAGES on the masterpiece. I'm not sure I made it through one before I was tired of chuckling.

Anyone have the relevant podcasts where this was discussed?

"I suggest we imbibe copious amounts of alcohol and just wait for the inevitable blast wave." - Castiel

I personally think that people like you with some kind of personal agenda, have screwed Vanguard for everyone else, and you have screwed yourselves out of a great game too. You call yourself an MMORPG player but you clearly aren't one if you would write something like that. Here's what I think about your comments. You unleashed your dorky trollish nerd rage about some game because you suffer from depression or something, and then you put your fingers in your ears and shout LALALALALALA I DONT WANNA HEAR! because you don't want people to tell you the truth. It's shiny by design you dumbass. Again, it's a f*cking fantasy game you dumb sh*t. You don't understand it BECAUSE you don't care about it, and because you are a f*cking retarded dumb sh*t. Perhaps you couldn't figure it all out because you didn't give the game ANY care and attention, you didn't read things properly, and you basically sat there with your thumb up your ass WANTING to not like it like some kind of dumb miserable bastard. You may be a retard who is too dumb to figure out how to play it, and ran back to WoW with your tail between your legs. Ok it's really clear to me now, you are just extremely dumb. THAT's why you didn't like this game! Are you about 9 years old? Did your mother drink and smoke crack when she was pregnant with you? Did she drop you on your head? Did you skip a lot of school and go sniff glue instead? Is there a history in inbreeding in your family? Whatever it is, I pity you, but it's very clear now that you are simply plain old dumb. Seriously..... if you can't understand this, you have no place writing anything about games like this. Go back to f*cking Peggle or something because you are totally out of your depth in proper games. Again, you are f*cking retarded? Again, go back to f*cking WoW or Counterstrike if you are too dumb to handle yourself in a grown ups game. Again, you don't understand what is going on because you are stupid, careless, and not interested in learning. Seriously you sound like a f*cking c*nt. Do you go on to a golf course and start waving the club around proclaiming that golf is sh*t because you can't hit the ball straight? New things take practice and people ENJOY LEARNING. They have brains, and they do stuff like that to occupy their brains. You sound like a typical f*cking 12 year old brat prick who wants everything handed on a plate and doesn't want to try or think about anything. What a f*cking scum bag sh*t for brains you are. No by the time you ready for the death penalty the majority of people understand how to play the game, because unlike you, they have brains, and they have their brains switched on. Not prepared to explore because you are a lazy dumb sh*t scumbag. Because you are a dumb, lazy, QUITTER. Your crack whore mother must be real proud of you. You obviously didn't get very far, which is predictable of you. Ahhh so here we finally reach the truth behind this whole bullsh*t story of yours. That makes you a complete prick.

I hope you are really proud of yourself, Mr Righteous Gameslayer. You helped kill the naughty game that had bugs in, and now instead we can all go and play... oh wait... there is f*ck all else to play! There is the much sh*ttier AOC, and the much sh*ttier WAR, and a bunch of other sh*tty messes. The only decent MMORPG out there is WoW, and as we've established, it's far too simple and shallow. So you were partly responsible for killing the one game that could developed in to something really great. It's still here after 2 years, and it now has an expansion and they increased the level cap and they have really tidied it up. Imagine where it could have been if it wasn't for the bullsh*t from people like you. The extra players could have turned this in to the epic experience that it could easily have been with more time and money.

If you take out all the stuff where he isn't being hostile it makes for a better rant. Anyway never played the game though I did look at it. I didn't think it looked all that great and passed.

Vanguard was supposed to be a 'next generation' game. When you aren't just spewing bile, it looks like you are claiming it is the same old game done slightly better. It would seem to be a failure either way.

I'm guessing that the amount of people that might have played this game and chose not to after reading this article can be counted without resorting to using more two hands.

I'm glad to hear they have finally turned it into a tolerable, if still generic game.